Saturday, June 6, 2020

SEGA has just celebrated its 60th anniversary - happy birthday you mad, beautiful bastards - which seems as good a time as any to reflect on the company's finest. Maybe it's OutRun, in all its iconic glory, Super Monkey Ball with its minimalist brilliance or perhaps you could even look a little closer to the modern day and put Yakuza 0 forward as the best of the bunch. For reasons entirely my own, it's Virtua Fighter 3 that's my personal pick.

It's not the best in AM2's series - Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown easily takes that crown, providing a crisp take on the no-frills pugilism that's as close to perfection as we'll get while we endure the indefinite wait for a follow-up - nor is it the most groundbreaking. The original takes that title, shaking up the industry as it did with its military-spec hardware and the move into muscular 3D. You could argue that Virtua Fighter 2 was the series at its most iconic, too, capturing the series at the height of its mainstream appeal.

Why Virtua Fighter 3, then? Partly it's because it captures a moment in time, when SEGA was still at the peak of its power, and when its power was plain to see. This was the debut of the Model 3 board, breaking cover in spectacular fashion at Tokyo's AOU show in the early months of 1996 - one of those moments, of which the 90s had many, when we all asked ourselves whether game graphics could get much better - asserting that SEGA was at the cutting edge of technology. It's ground they'd give up over time - by the time Virtua Fighter 4 came around on the NAOMI 2, those battlegrounds had seemingly moved elsewhere.

If we were to ask you to list a few things about former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, it’s likely that many of you would mention things like his role in the abolition of slavery in the U.S., his assassination, his hat and beard (which incidentally the latter was grown because a little girl suggesting he’d get more votes that way), or the Gettysburg Address. But on top of all that, as with George Washington before him and the legendary Teddy Roosevelt after, it turns out Lincoln was also an exceptional, near unbeatable fighter who in his younger years would throw down with anyone who felt like they were man enough. In fact, he often found himself in such matches simply because of his reputation as an exceptional fighter and individuals wanting to test their mettle against him.

Standing at an imposing 6 feet 4 inches (1.93 meters) tall and weighing around 210 pounds (95 kg) with a lean, muscular build, Lincoln was a formidable figure in his prime, noted by his peers as being, to quote one contemporary, “unnaturally strong”. While the future President shied away from manual labour in his youth, being more drawn to books and poetry, his rather humble beginnings ensured he didn’t really have a choice in the matter in the end. For example, he apparently had an axe put in his hands at the age of 8 and was expected to do his part for his family with it. As a result, by the time he reached adulthood, Lincoln had matured into a fine specimen of man, gaining a reputation for his prodigious strength.

Speaking of axes, perhaps both because of his extremely long arms combined with that strength, Lincoln also was known for his skills with that implement of destruction, legend has it able to split a railroad tie with a single swing. Color us a little skeptical on that one, but whether he literally could or not, he did later acquire the nickname of “Rail Splitter” alluding to Lincoln’s early background in manual labour instead of a more academic or silver spooned’ past.

In any event, exactly when Honest Abe first began wrestling isn’t clear, though Ronald C. White, author of A. Lincoln: A Biography, notes that he, to quote, “did quite a bit of wrestling during the years he lived in Indiana from ages 9 to 21″. He also added that wrestling was something of a Lincoln family tradition, with Lincoln’s uncle supposedly being an elite practitioner of the then somewhat freestyle version of the sport.

As for one of Lincoln’s most famous fights, this occurred after he moved from Indiana to New Salem, Illinois in his early 20s. There he found work as a store clerk thanks in part to his sheer size and strength, which allowed him to effortlessly move stock that normally took two lesser men to comfortably lift, or occasionally the need of a ladder.

Lincoln was known to use his unnatural strength to his advantage for profit in other ways besides a job, on one occasion betting a later close friend Bill Greene a fur hat that he could drink a shot from a barrel of whisky by lifting the entire thing above his head and drinking straight from the bunghole. Greene felt this would be an impossible feat of strength, but one which Lincoln pulled off easily.

Displays of brute strength like this didn’t go unnoticed by Lincoln’s employer, Denton Offutt, who bragged to neighbours and anyone who would listen that Lincoln was not just the most intelligent man in the region, but also strong enough to beat up anyone in town- a claim that eventually piqued the interest of a local bully said to be able to “lick anybody” called Jack Armstrong.

While it’s often claimed Jack Armstrong was the title holding champion of the state for wrestling, in fact there were no such organized titles at the time in Illinois and he more aptly simply had the reputation as the best fighter in the region, such as one account by Lincoln’s one-time law partner John T. Stuart, who stated Armstrong was the “champion of his clan”.

Speaking of that clan, Armstrong was the leader of a gang of unsavory individuals called The Clary’s Grove Boys, who naturally showed up for the fight after Armstrong challenged Lincoln and Lincoln accepted.

While accounts of this fight differ a bit depending on the teller, if you go back to a couple contemporary accounts of people who actually watched it, the general story seems to be that the two men met in a small clearing near the store under the watchful gaze of a small crowd, including Armstrong’s gang. Almost immediately after the match started it became clear that despite previously being considered the best fighter in the region, Armstrong was out of his depth, having no answer or counter to either Lincoln’s superior reach or strength.

Armstrong, sensing that there was little he could do and that he was close to defeat, allegedly tripped Lincoln, causing him to fall roughly to the ground- a dirty move that reportedly infuriated Lincoln. Whether this foul actually occurred, however, varies on the telling. For whatever it’s worth, in the biography Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, there is a supposed quote from Armstrong himself stating that he had indeed knocked Lincoln down, but, to quote him, “did not do it fairly.”

Whatever the case, what apparently did happen rather quickly in the fight was Lincoln falling at some point for whatever reason, then the giant of a man springing to his feet, grasping Armstrong, and lifting him clean above his head. In his best Hulk Hogan impression, he then slammed Armstrong to the ground as hard as he could.

Upon seeing their leader crumple to the floor in a daze, the Clary’s Grove Boys surrounded Lincoln.

Lincoln’s aforementioned law partner John Stuart, then states, “when it was evident that Lincoln was getting the better of their champion the whole Band pitched in and gave Lincoln several blows which had no very salutary effect on the strength of his legs. Lincoln however took all this in perfect good humor and by laughing and joking displayed such an excellent disposition that he at once won their hearts and was invited to become one of the company.”

One of the company, a man by the name of Royal Armstrong Clary, would state of all this, “He won us by his bearing and boldness. Jack and [Lincoln] were the warmest friends…” from then on. (Nothing like manhandling and then slamming your fellow man to the ground to spur a little bromance.)

Another well known fight of Lincoln’s occurred earlier in his life when his family were the only people not invited to a double wedding involving two brothers called Rueben and Charles Grigsby, who were marrying a pair of sisters called Matilda and Elizabeth Hawkins. Hurt by this perceived slight at his family, Lincoln penned a sarcastic poem, in which he accused the third Grigsby brother, William, of being gay. His reputation as a proper vagina loving man besmirched, William challenged Lincoln to put his hands all over him (aka wrestle).

Perhaps feeling bad about the whole thing or maybe just wanting to insult him more, Lincoln, who was a clear head taller than his challenger, suggested that this wouldn’t be fair to William and instead suggested William fight his step-brother, John D. Johnston who wasn’t near the fighter that Abe was. William accepted.

When the day arrived for the hotly anticipated showdown, as soon as the fight began, Grigsby quickly gained the upper hand and placed Johnston in a painful hold. It was at this point that, in a move that wouldn’t seem out of place at Wrestlemania, Lincoln barreled through the crowd, grabbed Grigsby from behind and suplexed him into the ground. The crowd, who were incensed and on the verge of a riot, closed in on Lincoln, who stood up straight and, allegedly yelled, “I’m the big buck of this lick. If any of you want to try it, come on and whet your horns”. Whether he actually said this or not is a matter of contention, and even has been attributed in a few cases to other of his fights. Whatever the case, it would appear once they closed on him, none were willing to actually attempt to fight the giant of man.

While it may seem wildly out of character to hear about Abraham Lincoln picking people up and manhandling them using his gigantic arms and freakish man-strength, this was far from out of character when reading about his youth from those who knew him at the time. And we have plenty of examples to back up this version of him. For example, when Lincoln ran for office in the Illinois General Assembly in 1832, at literally the first public speech he ever made in a small village called Pappsville, a fight broke out during which one of his supporters was struck and injured. Infuriated, without hesitating, Lincoln stepped down from the podium, briskly strode through the crowd, grabbed the attacker by the throat and pants, then, according to eyewitnesses, tossed him almost a dozen feet through the air.

All told it’s generally claimed that Lincoln was involved in around 300 fights in his youth and seemingly rather enjoyed the activity, as you would when you basically always won. And, of course, further lived in an era where a man’s worth in the sphere Lincoln grew up in was strongly tied to how well he could manhandle his fellow man… (At least, so long as it was in a totally heterosexual way.)

Speaking of always winning, while presumably he must have lost at least some fights as a kid, as far as any accounts from friends and the like reveal, including Lincoln himself alluding to this fact, Lincoln only ever lost one fight- against a man called Lorenzo Dow Thompson in 1832. This occurred when Lincoln was with the Illinois Militia during the Native American rebellion near the Mississippi river that came to be known as the Black Hawk War.

Due to his leadership skills and fearsome reputation, Lincoln was naturally voted to be his company’s commander and many an account later would note Lincoln’s men would basically do anything he said without question and were fiercely loyal to him. That said, though Lincoln’s company never saw any actual combat, they did ruffle a few feathers by stealing everything they could get their hands on, for which Lincoln was summarily reprimanded by his superiors.

As for what Lincoln got up to during the conflict, it’s recorded that he mostly spent his time with the militia honing his already impressive wrestling skills, often against “bullies” he felt were affecting morale.

This brings us to his fight with Mr. Thompson. After one particularly long day, Lincoln and his company tried to set up camp, only to be told that a rival company had already claimed the spot they’d chosen. After a few harsh words were exchanged, a deal was struck to settle the matter with a best of three wrestling match between each company’s best man.

On this one, Lincoln reportedly stated to one professor Risdon Moore in 1860,

Gentleman, I felt of Mr. Thompson, the St. Clair champion, and told my boys I could throw him, and they could bet what they pleased. You see, I had never been thrown, or dusted, as the phrase then was, and, I believe, Thompson said the same to the St. Clair boys, that they might bet their bottom dollar that he could down me. You may think a wrestle, or “wrastle,” as we called such contests of skill and strength, was a small matter, but I tell you the whole army was out to see it. We took our holds, his choice first, a side hold. I think realized from his grip for the first time that he was a powerful man and that i have no easy job. The struggle was a severe one, but after many passes and efforts he threw me. My boys yelled out “a dog fall,” which meant then a drawn battle, but I told my boys it was fair, and then said to Thompson, “now it’s your turn to go down,” as it was my hold then, Indian hug. We took our holds again and after the fiercest struggle of the kind that I ever had, he threw me again, almost as easily at my hold as at his own. My men raised another protest, but I again told them it was a fair down. Why, gentlemen, that man could throw a grizzly bear.

Incidentally, another account, this one by a close friend of Lincoln’s, the aforementioned “Slicky Bill Greene”, who witnessed the fight, Thompson overcame Lincoln the second time by, to quote him, getting “the crotch lock on Mr. Lincoln.” (We have no idea and those are probably some iffy words to google so we’re not going to). After getting “the crotch lock” on him, Lincoln, to quote Slicky Bill, “slid off”, which also isn’t a good thing to search in conjunction with “crotch lock”… But whatever that’s supposed to mean, in the process of sliding off the crotch lock of his fellow man, Thompson managed to grab Lincoln and throw him down as easy as church on Sunday.

While Lincoln’s temper cooled as he matured, he never lost his fighting spirit and even when he was President, much like Teddy Roosevelt would do later, Lincoln liked to challenge people to impromptu tests of strength.

One of Lincoln’s favourite tricks on this front, which dated all the way back to his childhood, was to pick up a woodcutting axe and hold it “at arm’s length at the extremity of the [handle] with his thumb and forefinger”. He would apparently challenge whomever he was with to do the same and see who could hold it longer. As for Lincoln, he could apparently hold this pose for several minutes, a feat few could match.

All leading us to the alternate timeline in which Lincoln heard Mr. Booth enter his theater box and instead of getting shot in the back of the head, simply suplexed the would-be assassin and then shouted about how he was “the big buck of this lick”, calling for another challenger.

EA has extended the availability of its free Xbox Series X upgrade for this year's Madden game - and presumably FIFA 21.

In early May, when Microsoft confirmed the first Xbox One games to support its free Xbox Series X upgrade scheme, EA came under fire for its own free next-gen upgrade for Madden 21. At the time, EA said that rather than providing the ability to upgrade to the Xbox Series X version at any time through Smart Delivery, the publisher would restrict upgrades to a limited window. You'd need to buy the Xbox One version of Madden 21 by 31st December this year and your Xbox Series X upgrade would have to be completed by 31st March 2021, otherwise you'd be forced to double dip.

Fans criticised these needless convolutions in the context of Microsoft's useful Smart Delivery feature, and it sounds like EA took notice. As Polygon noticed, EA has updated its website to announce its free Madden 21 upgrade will be available up to the release of Madden 22 in the summer of 2021.

Someone has remade P.T. in Half-Life: Alyx and it's as terrifying as you'd expect.

Modder AmbientDruth took Valve's VR-exclusive, stripped out all that is City 17 and replaced it with the horror of Hideo Kojima's endless corridor. PC Gamer pointed to a playthrough of the mod by YouTuber William McMahon and, yeah... good luck with that.

AmbientDruth has added almost everything that was in the original playable teaser, including the radio ambience, the red corridor ending and Lisa's audio. But there's more to come in future updates, including a flashlight, punishments for "bad deeds" such as breaking bottles, and Easter eggs.

People are downloading and playing a five-year-old build of Dead Island 2.

The build, which reportedly emerged on the V board of 4Chan, is playable, although there are placeholder assets throughout. It is dated June 2015. Footage from it is popping up all over YouTube:

Eurogamer has verified this build is the work of Spec Ops: The Line maker Yager, which was tasked by publisher Deep Silver with making the zombie sequel before both parties split amid creative differences in July 2015.

Bungie has signalled Destiny 2 will see its first Fortnite-style live event as powerful AI Rasputin takes aim at The Almighty, a massive Cabal superweapon that's on a collision course with The Last City on Earth.

This event is the climax of Destiny 2's 10th season, dubbed Season of the Worthy, and a storyline that involves The Almighty plummeting towards The Last City. The Almighty is a massive Cabal superweapon that was left broken and orbiting the Sun at the end of the Destiny 2 campaign. At the beginning of the season, a desperate Psion Flayer set The Almighty on a collision course with earth. Players then had to effectively charge up Rasputin via a series of Seraph Tower events so it could use its powerful weapons to shoot The Almighty out of the sky.

So, what should we expect? It's expected The Almighty does not destroy Earth or the Tower, but players have found evidence Destiny's famous social space does get properly smashed up - by glitching into the future of the Tower.

I haven't seen a Japanese friend of mine in well over a decade. Family is a complicated business, time has moved on, and circumstances have changed. I find I think about him regularly.

He's a man now, priorities and pressures and all. I wonder what he looks like. Perhaps a cigarette hanging slack from lips curled into a cheeky grin, that signature long hair now layered into a fashionable trim. Baggy T-shirt resting on a big boned frame. Those cropped chino trousers which rest just above the ankle, creased white trainers below. Gentle eyes, they won't have changed, though, I'm sure of it.

Our homes were close back then, so I'd pop over to his house regularly and we'd mainly play Super Smash Bros: Melee together. Gasps, laughs, wild gestures, the clack of buttons. Broken English, equally choppy Japanese. We couldn't really speak to each other, which sounds a little primitive in some ways, but I'm convinced the simplicity of our interactions actually led to complexities of expression, of eschewing vocality for a janky, often wordless communication. Not a single conversation between us, yet a strong behavioural understanding deepened by time in one another's company.

Battlegrounds - or PUBG, to its friends - inspired a wave of similarly styled last-man-standing games following its enormously successful early access release in 2017, and while it has long-since been overshadowed by the likes of Fortnite and Apex Legends, it still enjoys a healthy audience, welcoming well over 200,000 players a month on Steam according to SteamCharts.

Since its initial release, PUBG's 100-player skirmishes have expanded to cover six maps - a tutorial area, original location Erangel, the desert expanse of Miramar, the North African Karakin, the rainforest-themed Sanhok, and the snow-covered Vikendi - with the latter having received a major makeover earlier this year as part of the ongoing Season 7.

Xbox Series X is still set to launch this holiday but if you're after the most powerful console right now, the Xbox One X is going for £259.

The edition on sale is the Gold Rush Edition, which sports a unique dark grey and gold design, which doesn't look bad at all.

It's worth noting that this is just for the console, which is a shame as this appears to be the new low price point for the console as a bundle. Those bundles have however run out of stock, including at GAME, which had been taking pre-orders for the Cyberpunk 2077 edition for the same price. Nonetheless, you're still off to a good start considering it comes with a 1-month subscription Xbox Game Pass and a 14-day trial of Xbox Live Gold, which is all you need to take advantage of games like Red Dead Redemption 2, Streets of Rage 4 and plenty others on the service, while No Man's Sky also gets added this month.

It's time again for another sale on the Switch eShop. Running until 14th June, it boasts discounts of up to 80% off over 300 games.

Unfortunately, after further scrutiny, if you're looking for savings off first-party exclusives, you're out of luck here. But that doesn't mean there aren't deals worth considering.

Not for the first time, The Witcher 3 comes away as the big highlight down to £34.99. While not the biggest saving for a scaled down port, the Switch version does support cross-save with PC. So if you had taken advantage of the Witcher sale on GOG, then it's certainly worth being able to transfer your save when you want to carry on Witchering on the go.

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Overcooked, developer Ghost Town Games's chaotic, co-op-focussed cook-'em-up, is currently free on the Epic Games Store.

Released in 2016, Overcooked is a fun, family friendly multiplayer escapade, in principle, at least; it's got a bold, appealingly cartoony art-style, and a simple premise that pretty much anyone can wrap their head around, regardless of prior gaming experience.

The goal - which can be tackled by up to four players simultaneously in couch co-op - is simply to work together in order to fulfil an increasingly brisk and varied food orders for customers, frying, tossing, assembling, and whatever else is required in order to get it on a plate and through the service hatch.

Slay the Spire developer MegaCrit announced the news in a Steam update. It said the iOS version will be the full PC game. Screenshots of the iOS version seemed to confirm the newer fourth character, the Watcher, will be included (it's pictured as a fourth, unlockable character).

UPDATE 28/5/20: Fortnite has moved its upcoming live story event and new season clear of this weekend and next week, respectively.

In a blog post published last night, Epic Games announced it had postponed its "The Device" event until Monday 15th June, and Chapter 2 Season 3 to Wednesday 15th June.

"Recent events are a heavy reminder of ongoing injustices in society, from the denial of basic human rights to the impact of racism both overt and subtle against people of colour," Epic Games wrote. "We're acutely aware of the pain our friends, families, team members, players, and communities are experiencing.

It's pure nonsense yet these small videos are incredibly convincing, thanks in no small part to the all-encompassing nature of Slightly Mad Studios' Project Cars 2 which Arron uses for his flights of fancy. It goes to show that, for all its faults, there's perhaps been no more comprehensive a racing experience. This is the game that lets you do everything, whether that's taking a Porsche 917 around a recreation of vintage Le Mans or splashing around a sodden Cadwell Park in a clubman Ginetta.

Still, I was slightly taken aback when first laying eyes on Project Cars 3 - indeed, I wasn't even sure if this really could be Project Cars 3 as I watched a Mercedes AMG GTR being hustled around the streets of Shanghai and Havana. This was firmly in the realm of the arcade racer, territory Slightly Mad Studios' new owner Codemasters had staked out as recently as last year with the Grid reboot which saw spectacular street races around those same two cities. Is this new direction a result of the recent union between the two companies?

Word's been going around for a while that Sega's had some big news planned for this week, and it's leading with the announcement of a very small console - the Game Gear Micro, coming out in four variants in Japan to mark the 30th anniversary of Sega's only dedicated portable system.

Due out on October 6th (in Japan only for now - we've yet to hear about plans for a western release, and given how eccentric this diminutive machine is we'd be surprised to hear any), the four variants each come with their own four games, meaning you'll have to collect all four to get the entire catalogue.

It's a decent list, though, with developer Ancient's take on Sonic the Hedgehog - for my money one of the very best Sonic games - leading the way on the black version of the Game Gear Micro, alongside Puyo Puyotsu, Outrun and Royal Stone (known as Crystal Warriors in the west). The yellow edition is something of a Shining Force special, with three of Sega's RPGs being bundled with Nazo Puyo: Arle no Roux, a puzzle/RPG hybrid.

Wow Rhythm Fighter makes my brain hurt. It's the controls: it's like learning to type on a different language keyboard. There's an easy option but it puts you at a disadvantage overall and you can feel the game frown at you for choosing it.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Rhythm Fighter is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up where you have to do everything in time to bopping music. And it looks like a cartoon. And you fight giant vegetables. And you only get one life. Got it?

OK, the controls. They don't sound difficult but let me tell you: they do not feel natural.

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

We are appalled by the violence, oppression and injustice suffered by Black communities around the world. In common with many other organisations, we won't be publishing any content today, to allow other voices and more important issues to be heard.

Here's a statement co-signed by Eurogamer and many other sites in our network:

Where to put games. In the tech section? In the culture section? In the kid's section? Or how about this: let's put them between the invention of farming and the invention of pottery. The neolithic! This is where the first games are found. Mankind lives in walled environments, someone's in charge, and these game boards are being created, flat slabs with two parallel lines of holes in them.

These extremely early sorts of games are not directly present in 51 Worldwide Games, a Switch compilation that has had me completely spellbound for the last few weeks. Even so, I like to think it's all connected, which means that this reasonably priced compendium of dice and board and card games, of mechanical games and paper games and good old bowling, has sort of been in development for at least 5000 years. No wonder it's such a treat to play! No wonder it's such a confident, comprehensible thing. It puts Valve Time and Blizzard Time in the context of deep time.

I can make it sound quite bewildering if I talk about how it works. 51 Games supports single-player and multiplayer. Some games like Solitaire variants are single-player only, as the name suggests. Most are multiplayer. Many - mainly excluding card games where you need to keep your hand a secret - are multiplayer on a single Switch, some allowing for touchscreen controls, some allowing for Joy-Cons and many allowing for both. Then there's local play, which only requires one version of the game, and online multiplayer where everyone needs their own copy. (Online multiplayer's quite neat incidentally: you select three games you're interested in and then you can play solo while you wait for matches.)

Codemasters, creators of the beloved Colin McRae Rally series and the critically acclaimed Dirt Rally games, has secured the official WRC licence from 2023 (as reported by GI.biz), with a deal that currently runs through to 2027.

It does mean there'll be quite some time until we see the fruits of the deal, with a new game from the Dirt Rally team due before the deal commences, and with Dirt 5 also on the slate after its reveal earlier this year. Bigben Interactive continues to hold the licence and will carry on producing games in the meantime, with this year's WRC 9 set to continue developer Kylotonn's impressive run on the series.

The last Codemasters' game to carry the official WRC licence was Colin McRae Rally 3 back in 2002, whereupon it was picked up by Evolution Studios for a run of PS2-exclusive titles before Milestone stepped in.

Jackie Chan once said that a lot of people could do some of the little flourishes in his films if they wanted to. Not the big dangerous stunts, but the tiny things that make a scene. In one sequence, I think, there's a huge fight and Jackie keeps grabbing this fan that travels back and forth across the action. He makes this tricky thing - grabbing a fan out of the air - look so simple. Not because he's unnaturally graceful - although he is - but because he's willing to film something 200 times until he gets the result he wants. That's dropping a fan 199 times for that glorious 200th try where it all works. Most of us could look a little cooler if we were willing to Kubrick our way through life like Jackie Chan. Or Jackie Chan our way through life like Kubrick. Now I wish they had made a film together.

Anyway: A Night at the Races. We're in Celeste territory here - punishing 2D platforming gauntlets that hinge on understanding the simple controls - left, right, jump, dash - and the way these controls interact with the environment. Reader, I have done astonishing things in this game. Precision wall-jumps between spikes, air-dashes with one pixel between me and disaster. This is not because I'm unnaturally graceful - I am definitely not - but because I am willing to do this stuff 200 times to get to the end of one of the game's short levels.

For a while I wondered why I was so willing to stick with it. I think there are two reasons that go beyond the game itself and the pleasures of movement and connection that it conjures. The first is that restarts aren't just speedy, they're instantaneous. You don't even have to press a button to restart. The second is that unlike Celeste, you're always moving. Your little character is always rushing back and forth unless you're actually directing them somewhere. This one simply cannot stand still.

Though many of you are perhaps not familiar with the name Don LaFontaine, if you’ve ever watched a movie trailer basically ever, you have almost certainly heard his voice or at the least someone trying to mimic him. A titan of the entertainment industry, LaFontaine lent his inimitable voice to a quarter of a million projects during his career before his death in 2008. So how did the so-called “Voice of God” come to get the gig and, in so doing, help change the movie trailer industry forever?

Well, in a world where movie trailers looked like something a modern 9 year old made for his youtube channel that his mom totally subscribes to, one man would change it all. Born in 1940 in the city of Duluth, Minnesota, Donald Leroy LaFontaine led an unassuming life until one fateful day in 1953. It was on that day that he states his voice broke mid-sentence while talking to his mother about helping her with the dishes. He claims this turned a squeaky voiced pre-pubescent into a man with a voice that would make him millions.

As you might expect, being of an age when a boy’s life primarily consists of playing flappy with Mr. Happy and otherwise spending the remaining 12 seconds of the day when he wasn’t doing that making fun of his friends and being made fun of in turn, LaFontaine stated he was afraid to speak the next day at school after his voice changed and thus, initially refused. When his teacher became frustrated with this now mute student and forced him to speak, LaFontaine uttered a phrase he no doubt would say countless times to execs the world over, “What do you want me to say?” This apparently prompted his already frustrated teacher, who thought he was putting the voice on, to send him to the principal’s office.

He would later recount that this caused him to feel even more self-conscious about his voice. However, it didn’t take long for his friend’s to realize his baritone vocals allowed him to be “everybody’s dad” on the phone- i.e. he could be used to call the school, represent himself as their father, and let the secretary know his kid was sick and would be missing school that day. Some of these instances apparently were his first paid voice acting gigs.

In high school, LaFontaine joined both the choir and public speaking club, both of which we’re guessing he was just amazing at, or at the least probably helped him considerably later in his career. Whatever the case there, he also apparently gained a reputation as something of a joker, being named “wittiest boy” by his peers in his senior year book.

Although virtually everyone he met commented on how amazing his voice sounded, LaFontaine’s career actually started on the other side of the microphone, working as a recording engineer for the military after enlisting in 1958 fresh out of high school.

Once discharged, he moved to New York to continue his career, working variously as a recording engineer, editor, producer and writer for radio and film. Voice acting still wasn’t on his radar.

This bring us to 1962, when LaFontaine began doing a little work with radio producer Floyd Peterson on some spots for Dr. Strangelove. Impressed with his many suggestions for how to make a great radio spot promo and other such skills (again none of which included his golden voice), Peterson suggested the two go into business together, initially working out of Peterson’s apartment. The company formed by the pair, Floyd L. Peterson, Inc, is noted as one of the first to eventually focus almost exclusively on advertising movies. You see, before this time, film trailers were made almost exclusively in house by the studios. Despite this, if you go watch pretty much every movie trailer going back to the first in the early 20th century, let’s just say, the movie trailer industry has come a long way since then, and the whole quality being akin to a “9 year old who has a youtube channel his mother subscribes to” joke at the beginning of this piece wasn’t really that far off. It was when the studios finally branched out beyond their own internal creative staffs that the modern movie trailer as we know it was born.

Naturally in such an environment where the competition was mostly churning out uncompelling crap, the pair found immediate success with their little company growing to a few dozen employees within a couple years.

That said, at this point they were still failing to recognize one of their greatest assets- Don’s voice, instead using him just for his creative talents in promotion and writing ad copy and the like.

His first foray into the world of voice-over work finally came in 1964 while recording a radio spot for the film, Gunfighters of Casa Grande. In this one, the originally booked talent for the spot didn’t turn up, having mixed up his schedule. With deadline looming, however, something needed recorded, prompting those present to suggest LaFontaine do it instead. He did, and MGM loved it, something that surprised him. In his own words, he “took the $82 and ran like a thief”. (For reference, $82 in 1964 is equivalent to about $685 today.)

After this, while he continued to work on the more administrative and creative side, his golden voice became oft’ requested and he now occasionally wore all the hats that go with creating such advertisements, from making deals, to writing ad copy, to being the voice talent.

It was during this period when he and Peterson came up with a number of now cliché movie trailer lines, the most notable of which being “In a world where…” On the iconic line, Don states they simply thought it up because, “We have to very rapidly establish the world we are transporting them to and that’s very easily done by saying, ‘In a world where … violence rules.’ ‘In a world where … men are slaves and women are the conquerors.’ You very rapidly set the scene.”

Given his wide ranging talents and experience, Paramount pictures ultimately convinced LaFontaine to come work for them exclusively in 1978, heading up their trailer production department. Beyond lending his creative talents, this move also for a time made him “The voice of Paramount Pictures”. This changed somewhat when he was promoted to a vice president position. While others might be quite happy about moving up the ladder at one of the world’s biggest studios, he instead missed the more creative side of the work and, thus, within a year after receiving the promotion, left the company and New York in 1981, bound for LA.

Directly after, he got a call from an agent who convinced him he should focus almost exclusively on the voice-acting side of things, at which point his career exploded and he rapidly became the most requested voice talent in the world, both for his golden voice and skill at writing/tweaking ad copy in compelling ways. Towards the end of his career, he claimed he had worked on promo spots for over 5,000 films. On top of that, when counting all voice acting work, including freebies, he estimates he took about a quarter of a million voice acting jobs- everything from quick one liners to frequent guest narrator of clues on Jeopardy!

On that note, exactly how many sound bytes LaFontaine did during his career is impossible to tally, because along with his better known trailer and TV work, he lent his voice to tens of thousands of smaller projects, sometimes providing just a single, uncredited line for something. On top of that, up until the early 2000s when he became more recognizably famous after a few spots where he appeared directly as himself and everybody suddenly realized- holy crap the same guy was behind countless things we are all familiar with- he would even happily record answering machine messages for literally anyone who would ask him, free of charge. However, after he became more explicitly famous, he found these sorts of freebie spots impossible to keep up with, and so stopped doing them outside of if someone would donate to one of his favorite charities first, or as part of an charity auction where people could bid on him doing that for them or the like.

This means the only real source we have for estimating how many recordings LaFontaine did over his career is LaFontaine himself. And while you, like us, might be initially skeptical, as that figure kind of seems impossible, it is noted that at his peak LaFontaine would record upwards of 35 paid spots per day, and averaged about 60 spots a week on his slow periods, let alone all the quick freebies. And even if you go with the low end of 60 paid spots per week for the around 4-5 decades he was doing it, that’s still an astounding 125,000-150,000 spots. So it’s not improbable when adding in all the freebies, and that in the latter half of his career he was recording pretty well non-stop during his work hours.

On that note, in the early days of recording, he was also limited somewhat by the fact that he’d have to physically go from studio to studio to record. But with money and as technology progressed, he was able to spend his later years working from home, dramatically increasing his output and allowing him to expand his portfolio by recording small spots for individuals that he would have otherwise never been able to do for a price they could pay.

That said, his previous commute wasn’t so bad, as he apparently purchased a custom-made, pearl white stretch limo sporting such features as a fax machine (to receive scripts), an international phone, and the letters DLF (his initials) emblazoned on the side. Combined with a driver to take him from spot to spot while he prepped, it wasn’t such a bad gig.

In regards to the art of voice acting itself, LaFontaine was remarkably humble given his success and was always keen to praise the work of his peers and those who inspired him. Likewise, he rarely turned down interview requests and often doled out advice to those who asked. For example a once popular thing to do to try to get a more deep tone for your voice was to drink a lot and smoke… LaFontaine was quite against this, frankly stating, “Do not think that smoking and drinking is going to help you develop a deep, rich tone. Smoking and drinking will help you develop cancer and cirrhosis of the liver.”

As for what you should do, beyond recommending certain books, he states, “Singing lessons always help. You may never perform in Carnegie Hall, but you will improve your breath control, and expand the range of your vocal delivery. Also, simply using (not abusing) your voice by reading out loud will, over time, improve the quality and strength of your instrument… Remember, it’s not the quality of the voice that counts, it’s the quality of the delivery…. And [also] remember, practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”

He also advises even when lending one’s talents to something that is crap, it’s important to take it seriously, stating, “My philosophy is that you have to really believe what you’re reading, even if you think the film’s a piece of junk. Even the worst picture is someone’s favorite film, and that someone is the fan I am always talking to.”

In the end, LaFontaine remained prolific until his death in September of 2008, just a few days after his 68th birthday. Quite fittingly, the last line he ever recorded for public consumption was his own, often-parodied but never matched, catchphrase “In a world…”, followed by “There, I said it. Happy?” This was for the cartoon Phineas and Ferb.

Summing up his unusual career, he states, “I don’t think there will ever be another career quite like mine. It can’t be duplicated. I came into the field of movie promos just as it was being born. I had the opportunity to work in virtually every style, mostly reading copy that I had written or co-written. Many of the younger narrators of today grew up hearing me. And right or wrong, it became a sort of template for how trailers should be read.”

And if you’re wondering, he stated, “The voice I use in my work isn’t my normal speaking voice. It’s bigger, more exaggerated. If I tried to use my working voice outside of work, someone would call security.”

Sunday, May 31, 2020

Several hotels around the world catering to the uber-wealthy offer a bizarrely specific package that offers customers the chance to float around in a hot tub filled with champagne. As pleasant as it sounds to have your nether regions soak in warm bubbly, you’d think someone, somewhere would have taken the concept to its logical conclusion by filling a pool with their liquor of choice and swimming around in it. As it turns out, however, this would not only be impossibly expensive, but extremely dangerous too.

First though, as alluded to there, while there are several examples we could find of people filling things like hot tubs with champagne, such as one hotel in London offering this for a mere $50,000, every story we found discussing someone filling a pool with alcohol ended up being wildly exaggerated. For example, in 2010 a story broke about a hedonistic orgy of debauchery organised in the home of a British lord called Edward Davenport sometime in 2009 that involved a swimming pool filled with alcohol that party goers could row across. Now, that sentence probably conjured up an image of people wearing immaculate suits and Eyes Wide Shut masks, gliding across a pristine lake of shimmering alcohol, perhaps laughing about how rich they are while occasionally dipping champagne flutes into the water. In reality, however, the whole thing was a PR stunt by the brand Courvoisier and the “pool” only contained about 1,000 litres (264 gallons) of liquid. That’s a lot of booze, sure, but we’re guessing most people who read that sentence imagined a proper sized swimming pool filled with alcohol- not one of those oversized kiddy pools you can buy for about $50. Because oh yeah, along with the pool not even being big enough for a proper adult to lie down in, tickets for the event were on sale for £6.50, or about $11. Not exactly the hedonistic night of excess attended by only the ultra wealthy promised by the news headlines, which as ever are generally more interested in clicks than even feigning to attempt at accuracy.

The same can be said concerning the headlines you may have seen about the Starkenberger beer pools. Located in Tarrenz, Austria, beer aficionados can tour a castle said to contain the only pools in the world filled entirely with beer. Again, the truth is a little less impressive than that and while the pools are big enough to swim around in, being about 13 feet wide, they’re really more akin to oversized hot tubs than anything else, though they do come the closest we could find to an actual pool full of booze, ringing in at about 21,000 litres (5500 gallons) of beer. That said, it should be noted that it’s an extremely watered down version of the beverage. Also, it’s not a great idea to attempt to drink the beer. Beyond random people submersing their bodies in it, it’s apparently a bit of a thing for some to use the pools for their purported medicinal value in treating “open wounds and psoriasis”. Combined with the whole warm and watered down thing, best to bring your own drink.

So how much would it cost to fill an actual proper sized swimming pool entirely with a genuine undiluted alcoholic beverage rather than half-assing like mere plebians? Well, quite a lot. For starters, you’d need 2.5 million litres or about 660,430 gallons of your tipple of choice if you wanted to fill a standard Olympic pool. Sure, we could use the dimensions of a smaller pool for our math, but if you’re going to throw an opulent party, best to go big or go home. And, really, it’s still going to be quite expensive and obscenely dangerous.

So how much would this cost? Well, this depends on what you like to drink.

Starting with beer, you can buy a standard keg of beer containing 15.5 gallons of the nectar of the gods for about $175-$200. So you’d need about 42,600 kegs to fill the pool enough to satisfy Olympic guidelines. This would cost about $7,456,468 rounding to the nearest dollar. Now, you’d probably get some kind of discount for buying the equivalent of 5 million pints of beer at once, so you could probably shave a fair amount off that estimate. That said, as George Clooney discovered when he attempted to buy custom made Tequila in bulk, when buying huge volumes of alcohol like that, he was told you need an appropriate alcohol buying business license to do so. (Fun fact, in his case this resulted in he and a couple friends deciding to start a Tequila company, which they then sold a few years later for about a billion dollars.)

As for what sort of discounts you could get, for whatever it’s worth here, according to one brewer we looked at, they noted approximately 25% of the cost of the beer goes into actually producing the product, with the rest in profit margins, taxes, shipping, retail margins, etc. etc. So we guess in that case, if you made it yourself and also thus avoided all the taxes associated with selling alcohol, you might get the cost down to a couple million. Or alternatively, you might be able to get a bulk discount from a mass producer down to maybe $4M-$5M at best.

Moving on to the harder stuff, a standard bottle of wine contains 750ml of liquid, so you’d need 3,333,333 bottles and a third of another to fill the pool to the top. Depending on how much you like to spend on wine, the cost of filling the pool would vary dramatically. For example, you could potentially fill the pool entirely with Charles Shaw Wine, colloquially known as Two Buck Chuck in California because it sells for $1.99, for just over $6,633,333. Two Buck Chuck is infamously cheaper than bottled water in some stores so you’d actually be less opulent filling a pool with this than Evian or something. But if you’re stuck on wine, in this case, we’re guessing there wouldn’t be much of a bulk discount, as it’s already pretty close to the margins, which is why it gets progressively more expensive the further you get away from the maker.

As a quick aside here, beyond this discount wine having won several awards, despite its ultra cheap nature, contrary to popular belief, it is not sold cheaply to get back at the creator’s ex-wife or any similar internet rumors. In fact, Charles Shaw himself wasn’t even involved in setting the price as the label was acquired by another company, Bronco Wine Co., after Shaw declared bankruptcy in the 1990s. Beyond the Bronco Wine Company already dealing in inexpensive wines, the real genesis of Two Buck Chuck was simply a massive surplus of wine in late 2001 and 2002, which caused the company to sell off the surplus at even more rock bottom prices than their norm; it was that or dump it on the ground. Sales skyrocketed to the point where it still made sense to keep the price there and so they did, selling on the order of 800 million bottles of the stuff over the next decade alone.

As CEO Fred Franzia notes when people wonder how he makes a profit selling something cheaper than bottled water of the same size, “They’re overcharging for the water. Don’t you get it?… We choose to sell good quality wines at $2 a bottle because we think it’s a fair price. We think the other people are charging too much.”

Going back to filling pools with the swill, if you have more refined taste and wanted to fill the pool with a wine that allows you to put your nose higher in the air when you discuss it, even buying lower mid-level wine still raises the potential cost to well over $20,000,000 at best.

The same can be said of barrels of various spirits like whiskey and tequila. Using Jack Daniels as a baseline (a company that famously lets customers simply buy an entire barrel of its product because they’re just that nice, as are their lawyers as we’ve discussed before), a barrel containing roughly 210-240 litres of booze will you set you back about $12,000 to $13,500. There’s no fixed price for a barrel because some alcohol will naturally evaporate during the distilling process, something colloquially referred to by the company as “the angel’s share”. Funny enough from this, buying a barrel ends up costing more on average, resulting in you paying about $50 per bottle. However, it would be easier to empty a couple thousand barrels of wine into a pool than it would a few million bottles, so probably worth paying extra for the convenience.

How much would this cost in total? Well it’s difficult to get an exact figure because of the aforementioned evaporation, but our ballpark estimate is that it’d cost about $133,333,333 based on needing 11,111 barrels containing an average 225 litres of whiskey each being sold for $12,000 a piece. Again in this case we’re assuming you’d get a hefty discount for buying in bulk though. But even if you could cut that in half, you’re still looking at a sum beyond the realm of possibility for all but the richest of the rich.

Finally, we have champagne- since the numbers are already getting silly, let’s go all out and work out what it’d cost to fill your pool with a high-quality, well-reviewed champagne like Veuve Clicquot, a magnum of which you can buy for about $150 if you shop around. Once again plopping this into our little swimming pool equation, you’d need 1,666,666 bottles to fill the pool almost to the top, then most of another bottle to fill it to the brim. This would cost by our estimated about $250,000,000 if you got the champagne for the aforementioned price of $150 a bottle. Of course, at that price, you might just be able to buy a producer of the stuff yourself and ramp up production as needed for your pool filling dreams, and thus in the end get the actual amount at cost and without many of the associated taxes. You could then turn around and sell the company after the party to get your other money back. Although given the volume used there for you instead of filling shelves, you’d probably see a lot of your previous contracts canceled and thus, the value of your company may or may not be what it was before.

But either way, even if you managed to get it for the bargain basement price of the $100 million or so you have lying around in your couch cushions, you certainly wouldn’t want to swim in it.

As you may or may not be aware, alcohol is less dense than water, making it incredibly difficult for you to stay buoyant; so swimming in a spirit like bourbon or vodka would not exactly be easy.

But maybe you’re a strong swimmer and you don’t care about that. Well, the real problem is the fumes from the alcohol which in all likelihood would very rapidly get you dangerously drunk. And the thing is, unlike, say, when drinking normally where various mechanisms, including in the extreme passing out or vomiting, keep you from drinking yourself to death in most cases, when breathing alcohol, there is no such stop mechanism here other than getting away from the pool to cleaner air. Further, that alcohol is going right in your blood, rather than needing some processing time in your gut. The result is you can extremely rapidly reach alcohol poisoning levels that will kill you dead. And, of course, let’s just say passing out while in a pool isn’t exactly a great recipe for living even when it’s filled with just water. For further details on why inhaling alcohol vapor is a really bad idea vs drinking it, go see our article The Good and the Bad of Vaporizing and Inhaling Alcohol.

But for now, as a real world example here, we have the case of the Silver Sage Winery in Canada proving immersing yourself in wine, for example, is a bad idea. In this case, a worker named Victor Manola actually fell into a 2,300 liter (600 gallon) tank of still fermenting wine in 2002. The owner of the winery, Frank Supernak, reached in to help pull him out, but himself slipped and fell in. Tragically, both were overcome and died before they could get out.

On top of that, it’s noted that even people treading water in the little watered down beer pools of Starkenberger castle have occasionally reported getting drunk off nothing more than the fumes they breath in.

But to sum up, any stories you have heard about the uber rich having debauched parties with alcohol filled swimming pools are most assuredly myths or wild exaggerations. In the end, even with massive bulk discounts, the price tag associated even for the cheapest of alcohols is incredibly high. And more to the point, just standing near the pool for any length of time could get you dangerously drunk, let alone swimming in it. And let’s just say we hope no one hanging around the pool is a smoker, because lighting up near it… You’re gonna have a bad time.

There have been some big changes in Apex Legends recently, from the arrival of new Legend Loba to nerfs and buffs to existing Legends like Mirage and Pathfinder. However, Respawn's attempts to shake things up haven't been enough to impact which are our favourite Legends, it seems.

According to DreamTeam.gg (thanks, Dexerto), Wraith remains the most popular Legend to use in season five, hitting a usage rate of 27 per cent across all platforms - that makes her three times more popular than the second most used character.

Pathfinder and Lifeline come in second and third place with usage rates of 10 per cent and 9 per cent respectively.

Testing for 343 industries' remastered Halo 3 is rolling out to PC "in the first half of next month".

In a new community update, 343i's Postums said the closed Halo 3 testing will permit the team to test its distribution pipeline, test updates to Challenges, gather feedback on the content, and "ensure all supporting systems are functioning properly in preparation for bringing Halo 3 to Halo: The Master Chief Collection on PC".

"Halo 3 is the next game in our lineup making its way to PC," wrote "Postums" (thanks, RPS). "In 2007, it was the Halo title that brought us Theater, Forge, and some of the community's most beloved gametypes like Grifball, Infection, and many more. Halo 3 holds a special place in many player's hearts and we know it's one of, if not THE most anticipated titles in the collection. In good news, public flighting for Halo 3 PC is on the horizon!"